Bridget Elworthy of The Land Gardeners' Jacobean manor

By Clare Foster

05 September 2017

As
The Land Gardeners, Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld are establishing a
reputation for designing walled gardens and growing cut flowers at
their Wardington Manor base, but their real passion is
compost

A passion for plants, as well as a rather
healthy obsession with compost, is what brought Bridget Elworthy
and Henrietta Courtauld together three years ago
to form The Land Gardeners. Specialising in the design of
productive gardens - particularly walled gardens - they also run a
thriving cut-flower business from Bridget's home, Wardington Manor
in Oxfordshire, juggling teenage children with gardening, lecturing
and designing for clients in this country and abroad.

Dressed
in their daily uniform of jeans, boots and navy canvas smocks (with
pockets that are big enough to hold secateurs, a ball of string and
a small vase filled with water), these two women are as happy
digging over their compost heaps as they are giving a talk on
tulips at Soane in London, and they certainly are not afraid of
getting their hands dirty.

Having
met in London a dozen years ago when their children were at the
same nursery, they trained separately in garden design: Henrietta
at the Inchbald School of Design and Bridget at the Oxford College
of Garden Design. Henrietta went on to work with landscape and
garden designers Christopher Bradley-Hole and Tom Stuart-Smith,
where she specialised in planting design. In her native New
Zealand, Bridget grew cut flowers and experimented with biodynamic
gardening on the family farm, before moving back to the UK eight
years ago. Her husband Forbes runs Craigmore Sustainables, a
company dedicated to sustainable farm and land management, so the
couple have had an active interest in soil science and organic
growing for many years.

In
2008, the Elworthys moved to Wardington Manor, a Jacobean house
near Banbury that had been the home of Lord Wardington and his wife
Audrey, who had been a well-known Fifties model. The house
was severely damaged by a fire in 2004, but subsequently restored.
A year later, Lord Wardington died and Lady Wardington moved to a
house in the village and put the manor on the market. The
Elworthys took over the restored house with its iconic Twenties
plasterwork and spectacular wood-panelled library, as well as the
30 acres of grounds, which included a fabulous Victorian walled
garden.

Bridget
soon started formulating a plan to grow cut flowers in the walled
garden, an enterprise that has spread to include every inch of the
garden, from the traditional herbaceous borders now planted with
swathes of delphiniums to the wilder reaches of the garden, where
large shrubs are regularly plundered for their flowers. It's very
much a working garden designed for functionality, but it manages to
look effortlessly beautiful at the same time. 'This is the type of
garden we like designing for others,' says Bridget. 'Productive
gardens are becoming increasingly important to people, and walled
gardens in particular have become our focus. We design and plant
them, as well as acting as consultants to anyone wanting to run
their garden in a more sustainable and economic way. But we
love fun and frivolity, and design theatrical, abundant gardens
that aren't too controlled.'

With
Henrietta running her own garden-design studio in Notting Hill at
the time, the two decided to pool their resources in 2013 and now
spend time both in London and Oxfordshire. 'Henrietta comes up to
Wardington one or two days a week and I go down to London once a
week to work in the design studio,' explains Bridget. 'We're both
still very much involved in the flower growing, which is the whole
point of what we're doing.' Henrietta adds, 'You only really get to
understand plants by working with them, so it's definitely the
thing that we have to keep coming back to. It keeps us
connected.'

Once a week, armfuls of
seasonal English flowers that have been grown in the bucolic
setting of the manor are packed in the back of a van and sent down
the motorway to clients in London: myriad wild and cultivated
blooms including tulips and honesty in spring, roses and ammi in
early summer, dahlias and cosmos in late summer and autumn. They
sell to florists Scarlet &
Violet, Shane
Connolly and Flora
Starkey, among others, and have an increasing fan club of
individual clients who sign up for their 'bucket scheme'. 'People
leave their buckets on the doorstep and we fill it with whatever we
happen to be cutting that week,' says Bridget. 'We hope we'll be
able to offer vegetables soon, too.'

But
despite the frills of beautiful cut flowers and exotic garden
locations, the pair are adamant that what their business really
boils down to is soil health. Sustainability starts with the soil,
as Bridget and Forbes discovered while working on the family farm
in New Zealand. 'Soil health, animal health and ultimately human
health are all linked,' says Bridget. 'The two largest costs
after salaries on the farm were fertilisers and animal
health. If the fertilisers were working, in theory there
should be no issues with animal health, so there had to be
a better way to feed the soil.'

The
garden at Wardington is run completely organically, without the use
of pesticides or artificial fertilisers, but sustainability is
about adding goodness as well as taking away the chemicals, and
this is where the interest in soil and compost comes in. 'It's all
to do with a plant's resilience,' says Henrietta. 'The right
nutrients in the soil help to protect it from disease - and when
you grow plants, nutrients are constantly being depleted, so you
need to replace them with compost or manure.'

Over the past year or
two, the pair have been intensively researching composting methods,
talking to experts and organising compost workshops at Wardington Manor. 'There's a lot of research going
on at the moment into the benefits of certain soil microbes on
human health and well-being,' says Bridget. Intriguingly, there may
indeed be a natural antidepressant present in the soil. It has been
found that the soil microbe Mycobacterium vaccae appears to
stimulate serotonin production, which makes you feel happier and
more relaxed - so getting your hands dirty while gardening or
turning your compost heaps every day may not be such a bad
thing.

The
Land Gardeners have been talking to the Soil Association about ways
to connect growers with their community, as well as the possibility
of introducing a listing system for historic gardens. 'Ultimately,
our aim is to build a network of specialists in soil health and
microbiology, so we can spread the word about how to look after
soil to farmers or gardeners,' says Bridget. Down-to-earth is
undoubtedly the best expression to use in describing this
compost-crusading pair, who have made it their mission to
educate and inform people about soil health as the key to a
successful, beautiful and productive garden. Definitely time to go
and turn my own compost heaps…